quote dump

relaying

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”

― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

e-motional physics

An emotion is supplanted by a stronger one.

“22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but "Nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though—why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad "philology." It is no matter of fact, no "text," but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality before the law—Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic—likewise a second and more refined atheism—is once more disguised. "Ni dieu, ni maitre"—that, also, is what you want; and therefore "Cheers for natural law!"—is it not so? But, as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along, who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same "Nature," and with regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power—an interpreter who should so[…]”

On W3C and standards

Validity, in this scenario, is an ideological construct. The promise is that by hewing to the rules put forth by the W3C, your site will be accessible to more people than would a less valid page. Both pages work fine for most people; browsers are tolerant of all sorts of folderol. The ultimate function of any standards body is epistemological; given an enormous range of opinions, it must identify some of them as beliefs. The automatic validator is an encoded belief system. Not every Web site offers valid HTML, just as not every Catholic eschews pre-marital sex. The percentage of pure and valid HTML on the web is probably the same as the percentage of Catholics who marry as virgins.

DWYL HENNY

In life, you will become known for doing what you do. That sounds obvious, but it’s profound. If you want to be known as someone who does a particular thing, then you must start doing that thing immediately. Don’t wait. There is no other way. It probably won’t make you money at first, but do it anyway. Work nights. Work weekends. Sleep less. Whatever you have to do… We have these brief lives, and our only real choice is how we will fill them. Your attention is precious. Don’t squander it. Don’t throw it away. Don’t let companies and products steal it from you. Don’t let advertisers trick you into lusting after things you don’t need. Don’t let the media convince you to covet the lives of celebrities. Own your attention — it’s all you really have. if we live in an attention economy, then couldn't we enrich ourselves with spending our attention on ourselve.

robust is usually a word that applies to an algorithm’s ability to return correct and useful output (or at least mitigate damages and fail gracefully) in the face of hostile input such as missing values, evolving distributions of feature inputs, increasing/decreasing dimensionality and to some extent misinformation and environments in which it couldn’t have been expected to succeed. The opposite of robustness might be brittleness, like a pane of glass that shatters when struck. The holy grail of machine learning is a totally Robust algorithm that learns under any possible circumstance.

SPRIT IN THE MACHINE

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer’s spells.

—Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1984)

"People love the idea of a malevolent puppeteer because it denies the existence of individual agency"

Hamliton Norris

nietzsche

BEYOND GOOD AND EVILL

"WE, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF"

Perhaps it is some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition has not yet ceased doing mischief, perhaps a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human--all-too-human facts.

But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of the nightmare of Dogmatic Philosophy, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier sleep, we, whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the perspective--the fundamental condition of life…

With such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals; the European feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice atttempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow→

But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we Good Europeans, and free, VERY free spirits--we ahve it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! and perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows?

What questionable questions!

It is already a long story; yet it seems as it if were hardly commenced.

That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT REALLY IS THIS WILL TO TRUTH IN US? IN FACT WE MADE A LONG HALT AT THE QUESTION AS TO THE ORIGIN OF THIS WILL. AND ANOTHER QUESTION: THE VALUE OF THIS WILL. WHY NOT RATHER UNTRUTH? EVEN IGNORANCE?

AND COULD IT BE BELIEVED THAT IT AT LAST SEEMS TO US AS IF THIS PROBLME HAD NEVER BEEN PROPOUNDED, BEFORE, AS IF WE WERE THE FIRST TO DISCERN IT, GET SIGHT OF IT, AND RISK RAISING IT? FOR THERE IS RISK IN RAISING IT, PERHAPS THERE IS NO GREATER RISK.

[...] besides being probably made form some corner, perhaps form below—“frog perspectives”

does perhaps more value belong to delusion, selfishness and cupidity than to true, positive, and the unselfish?

Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous Perhapses! FOR THAT INVESTIGATION ONE MUST AWAIT THE ADVENT OF A NEW ORDER OF PHILOSOPHERS WHO WILL HAVE OTHER TASTES AND INCLINATIONS, THE REVERSE OF THOSE HITHERTO PREVALENT—PHILOSOPHERS OF THE DANGEROUS “PERHAPS”.

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. How far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions are the most indispensable to us—without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—THE RENUNCIATION OF FALSE OPINIONS OWULD BE A RENUNCIATION OF LIFE, A NEGATION TO LIFE. TO RECOGNIZE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE—that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

philosophers: They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of “inspiration”) whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or “suggestion,” which is generally at their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.

what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of is the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography—moreover, the moral the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true, vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. IS IT NOT WISE TO FIRST ASK ONESELF: WHAT MORALITY DO THEY AIM AT?

accordingly, I do not believe that an “impulse to knowledge” is the rathe rod philosophy’ but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.

for every impulse is imperious, and as such, attempts to philosophize. imperious: assuming power without justification; arrogant and domineering.

In the philosopher there is absolutely nothing impersonal: his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS—in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.

Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but "Nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though—why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad "philology." It is no matter of fact, no "text," but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality before the law—Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic—likewise a second and more refined atheism—is once more disguised. "Ni dieu, ni maitre"—that, also, is what you want; and therefore "Cheers for natural law!"—is it not so? But, as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along, who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same "Nature," and with regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power—an interpreter who should so place the unexceptionalness and unconditionalness of all "Will to Power" before your eyes, that almost every word, and the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually seem unsuitable, or like a weakening and softening metaphor—as being too human; and who should, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary" and "calculable" course, NOT, however, because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely LACKING, and every power effects its ultimate consequences every moment. Granted that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better.

THE MAGIC OF THE EXTREME, THE SEDUCTION THAT EVERYTHING EXTREME EXERCISES

He wanted, he writes, “to feel something, to break through the anesthesia, to prove to myself that I wasn’t just asleep.”

How did “Nietzsche cultivate the existential defiance or courage that led [him] up the mountain?” Kaag asks.

It probably started something like this—in a very simple refusal to act on behalf of one’s obvious self-interest. There remains a life-affirming glee in such a refusal—a quiet temptation that even the most well-adjusted person feels at various points.

As Kaag advanced along Nietzsche’s trek, his refusal started to take the form of fasting so intense, it often left him dizzy. When he finally relented, he stumbled into a luxury hotel and ordered a sickeningly opulent multicourse meal.

His reversal was radical—and, in some ways, utterly Nietzschean: “The spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises,” Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power

THE WILL TO POWER

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.

MISC

Look I shout. We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How--! Words fail me. Look at these men! I recommence. Men! Those in the crowd who can crane to look at the prisoners, even at the flies that begin to settle on their bleeding welts. [...] It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockraoches, ants, in their various ways . (NIETZSCHE HALLA)